Big Changes are coming to OneDrive, but what are they?
In the last full week of April 2025, Microsoft will make the first big change of the year to OneDrive by restricting access to unlicensed accounts. A few weeks later, they will make the next big change by either charging for the space used, if your organisation is configured for that, or by moving the data to the recycle bin. 93 days later it will be permanently deleted!
You may not know that you even have unlicensed accounts. These come about for various reasons, such as when a subscription expires, or when a license is removed when someone leaves the organisation. You can see whether any of these accounts exist in your tenant in the SharePoint Admin Centre under Reports > OneDrive Accounts. This example shows an organisation with around 600 active users having almost 3TB of old OneDrive data.
Up until now Microsoft has been footing the bill for all this storage, but they’re finally putting an end to this with the upcoming changes. The initial move to set all data to read-only will happen on 25/04/2025 and then three weeks later, on 16/05/2025 the data will be moved to the recycle bin or, if configured, to archive.
How will this affect you?
The long and short of it is that if you don’t act, you could lose data, receive unexpected charges, and end up with a security or compliance nightmare. It may be that no one is using this data and when Microsoft delete it, no one will notice. However, in the example of someone being granted access to a leaver’s OneDrive account as a stop-gap measure, they may still be relying on data in there and have no idea that the data will soon be gone.
For organisations using Microsoft 365 Archive the change in policy will cause all data in unlicensed accounts to be moved to archive storage. This is very cost effective on an ongoing basis, but costs ramp up when any data needs to be restored.
From a compliance and security perspective, unmanaged OneDrive accounts can be a blind spot. Old, unlicensed accounts can contain sensitive information that no one is paying attention to. Not managing this data properly could lead to breaches, leaks or compliance violations.
What can you do?
This new policy will take effect whether you like it or not. It’s important to be aware of the change and to agree what your business is going to do about it.
- Option 1 – Do nothing. If you’re certain that there’s nothing valuable in your unlicensed OneDrive account, and that the data being deleted won’t cause a compliance issue, you can choose to do nothing. If you have Microsoft 365 Archive configured, the data will be moved to here. If you don’t, the data will be moved to the Recycle Bin and eventually be deleted.
- Option 2 – Configure a Retention Policy. In a way, this is what Microsoft have been doing free of charge up until now. If you’d like to play it safe and know that the data will be there if you need it, you can configure a retention policy in Microsoft 365 Archive to keep the data indefinitely. This service costs $0.05/GB per month once the data has been moved. If you ever need to restore data from the archive, this costs $0.60 for each restored gigabyte.
- Option 3 – Migrate the data you need. This approach involves doing a full analysis of the data in these unlicensed accounts and allows a business to make informed decisions on what to do with it. This addresses potential compliance issues and ensures costs are only incurred for data the business actually needs to keep.
How can we help?
Our Modern Work team can help your business understand this risk in more detail, help configure retention tools like Microsoft 365 Archive and provide migration services to ensure you are in control of the data you own.
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